by Willa Cather
“Do you remember,” I said slowly, “I used to hold that, in the end, Kenneth would be measured by what he didn’t do, by what he couldn’t do? What a wonder he was at not being able to do it. Surely, if Bertha couldn’t convince him, fire and faggots couldn’t.”
“For, after all,” sighed Harrison, as we rose to go, “Bertha is a wonderful woman—a woman of her time and people; and she has managed, in spite of her fatal facility, to be enough sight better than most of us.”
ELEANOR’S HOUSE
“Shall you, then,” Harriet ventured, “go to Fortuney?” The girl threw a startled glance toward the corner of the garden where Westfield and Harold were examining a leak in the basin of the little fountain, and Harriet was sorry that she had put the question so directly. Ethel’s reply, when it came, seemed a mere emission of breath rather than articulation.
“I think we shall go later. It’s very trying for him there, of course. He hasn’t been there since.” She relapsed into silence—indeed, she had never come very far out of it—and Harriet called to Westfield. She found that she couldn’t help resenting Ethel’s singular inadeptness at keeping herself in hand.
“Come, Robert. Harold is tired after his journey, and he and Ethel must have much to say to each other.”
Both Harold and his wife, however, broke into hurried random remarks with an eagerness which seemed like a protest.
“It is delightful to be near you here at Arques, with only a wall between our gardens,” Ethel spurred herself to say. “It will mean so much to Harold. He has so many old associations with you, Mrs. Westfield.”
The two men had come back to the tea-table, and as the younger one overheard his wife’s last remark, his handsome brown face took on the blankness of disapproval.
Ethel glanced at him furtively, but Harriet was unable to detect whether she realized just why or to what extent her remark had been unfortunate. She certainly looked as if she might not be particularly acute, drooping about in her big garden-hat and her limp white frock, which had not been very well put on. However, some sense of maladroitness certainly penetrated her vagueness, for she shrank behind the tea-table, gathering her scarf about her shoulders as if she were mysteriously blown upon by a chilling current.
The Westfields drew together to take their leave. Harold stepped to his wife’s side as they went toward the gate with their guests, and put his hand lightly on her shoulder, at which she waveringly emerged from her eclipse and smiled.
Harriet could not help looking back at them from under her sunshade as they stood there in the gateway: the man with his tense brown face and abstracted smile, the girl drooping, positively swaying in her softness and uncertainty.
When they reached the sunny square of their own garden, Harriet sank into a wicker chair in the deep shadow of the stucco wall and addressed her husband with conviction:
“I know now, my dear, why he wished so much to come. I sensed it yesterday, when I first met her. But now that I’ve seen them together, it’s perfectly clear. He brought her here to keep her away from Fortuney, and he’s counting on us to help him.”
Westfield, who was carefully examining his rose-trees, looked at his wife with interest and frank bewilderment, a form of interrogation with which she was perfectly familiar.
“If there is one thing that’s plainer even than his misery,” Harriet continued, “it is that she is headed toward Fortuney. They’ve been married over two years, and he couldn’t, I suppose, keep her across the Channel any longer. So he has simply deflected her course, and we are the pretext.”
“Certainly,” Westfield admitted, as he looked up from his pruning, “one feels something not altogether comfortable with them, but why should it be Fortuney any more than a hundred other things? There are opportunities enough for people who wish to play at cross-purposes.”
“Ah! But Fortuney,” sighed his wife, “Fortuney’s the summing up of all his past. It’s Eleanor herself. How could he, Robert, take this poor girl there? It would be cruelty. The figure she’d cut in a place of such distinction!”
“I should think that if he could marry her, he could take her to Fortuney,” Westfield maintained bluntly.
“Oh, as to his marrying her! But I suppose we are all to blame for that—all his and Eleanor’s old friends. We certainly failed him. We fled at the poor fellow’s approach. We simply couldn’t face the extent of his bereavement. He seemed a mere fragment of a man dragged out from under the wreckage. They had so grown together that when she died there was nothing in him left whole. We dreaded him, and were glad enough to get him off to India. I even hoped he would marry out there. When the news came that he had, I supposed that would end it; that he would become merely a chapter in natural history. But, you see, he hasn’t; he’s more widowed than before. He can’t do anything well without her. You see, he couldn’t even do this.”
“This?” repeated Westfield, quitting his gardening abruptly. “Am I to understand that she would have been of assistance in selecting another wife for him?”
Harriet preferred to ignore that his tone implied an enormity. “She would certainly have kept him from getting into such a box as he’s in now. She could at least have found him some one who wouldn’t lacerate him by her every movement. Oh, that poor, limp, tactless, terrified girl! Have you noticed the exasperating way in which she walks, even? It’s as if she were treading pain, forbearing and forgiving, when she but steps to the tea-table. There was never a person so haunted by the notion of her own untidy picturesqueness. It wears her thin and consumes her, like her unhappy passion. I know how he feels; he hates the way she likes what she likes, and he hates the way she dislikes what she doesn’t like. And, mark my words, she is bent upon Fortuney. That, at least, Robert, he certainly can’t permit. At Fortuney, Eleanor is living still. The place is so intensely, so rarely personal. The girl has fixed her eye, made up her mind. It’s symbolic to her, too, and she’s circling about it; she can’t endure to be kept out. Yesterday, when I went to see her, she couldn’t wait to begin explaining her husband to me. She seemed to be afraid I might think she hadn’t poked into everything.”
While his wife grew more and more vehement, Westfield lay back in a garden-chair, half succumbing to the drowsy warmth of the afternoon.
“It seems to me,” he remarked, with a discreet yawn, “that the poor child is only putting up a good fight against the tormenting suspicion that she hasn’t got into anything. She may be just decently trying to conceal her uncertainty.”
Harriet looked at him intently for a moment, watching the shadows of the sycamore-leaves play across his face, and then laughed indulgently. “The idea of her decently trying to conceal anything amuses me. So that’s how much you know of her!” she sighed. “She’s taken you in just as she took him. He doubtless thought she wouldn’t poke; that she would go on keeping the door of the chamber, breathing faint benedictions and smiling her moonbeam smile as he came and went. But, under all her meekness and air of poetically foregoing, she has a forthcomingness and an outputtingness which all the brutality he’s driven to can’t discourage. I’ve known her kind before! You may clip their tendrils every day of your life only to find them renewed and sweetly taking hold the next morning. She’d find the crevices in polished alabaster. Can’t you see what she wants?” Mrs. Westfield sat up with flashing eyes. “She wants to be to him what Eleanor was; she sees no reason why she shouldn’t be!”
Westfield rubbed the stiff blond hair above his ear in perplexity. “Well, why, in Heaven’s name, shouldn’t she be? He married her. What less can she expect?”
“Oh, Robert!” cried Harriet, as if he had uttered something impious. “But then, you never knew them. Why, Eleanor made him. He is the work of her hands. She saved him from being something terrible.”
Westfield smiled ironically.
“Was he, then, in his natural state, so—
so very much worse?”
“Oh, he was better than he is now, even then. But he was somehow terribly off the key. He was the most immature thing ever born into the world. Youth was a disease with him; he almost died of it. He was so absorbed in his own waking up, and he so overestimated its importance. He made such a clamor about it and so thrust it upon one that I used to wonder whether he would ever get past the stage of opening packages under the Christmas tree and shouting. I suppose he did know that his experiences were not unique, but I’m sure he felt that the degree of them was peculiarly his.
“When he met Eleanor he lost himself, and that was what he needed. She happened to be born tempered and poised. There never was a time when she wasn’t discriminating. She could enjoy all kinds of things and people, but she was never, never mistaken in the kind. The beauty of it was that her distinctions had nothing to do with reason; they were purely shades of feeling.
“Well, you can conjecture what followed. She gave him the one thing which made everything else he had pertinent and dignified. He simply had better fiber than any of us realized, and she saw it. She was infallible in detecting quality.
“Two years after their marriage, I spent six weeks with them at Fortuney, and even then I saw their possibilities, what they would do for each other. And they went on and on. They had all there is—except children. I suppose they were selfish. As Eleanor once said to me, they needed only eternity and each other. But, whatever it was, it was Olympian.”
II
Harriet was walking one morning on the green hill that rises, topped by its sprawling feudal ruin, behind Arques-la-Bataille. The sunlight still had the magical golden hue of early day, and the dew shone on the smooth, grassy folds and clefts that mark the outlines of the old fortifications. Below lay the delicately colored town,—seen through a grove of glistening white birches,—the shining, sinuous curves of the little river, and the green, open stretches of the pleasant Norman country.
As she skirted the base of one of the thick towers on the inner edge of the moat, her sunshade over her shoulder and her white shoes gray with dew, she all but stepped upon a man who lay in a shaded corner within the elbow of the wall and the tower, his straw hat tilted over his eyes.
“Why, Harold Forscythe!” she exclaimed breathlessly.
He sprang to his feet, baring his head in the sun.
“Sit down, do,” he urged. “It’s quite dry there—the masonry crops out—and the view’s delightful.”
“You didn’t seem to be doing much with the view as I came up.” Harriet put down her sunshade and stood looking at him, taking in his careless morning dress, his gray, unshaven face and heavy eyes. “But I shall sit down,” she affectionately assured him, “to look at you, since I have so few opportunities. Why haven’t you been to see me?”
Forscythe gazed attentively at her canvas shoes, hesitating and thrusting out his lower lip, an impetuous mannerism she had liked in him as a boy. “Perhaps—perhaps I haven’t quite dared,” he suggested.
“Which means,” commented Harriet reproachfully, “that you accredit me with a very disagreeable kind of stupidity.”
“You? Oh, dear, no! I didn’t—I don’t. How could you suppose it?” He helped her to her seat on the slant of gray rock, moving about her solicitously, but avoiding her eyes.
“Then why do you stand there, hesitating?”
“I was just thinking”—he shot her a nervous glance from under a frown—“whether I ought not to cut away now, on your account. I’m in the devil of a way in the early morning sometimes.”
Mrs. Westfield looked at him compassionately as he stood poking the turf with his stick. She wondered how he could have reached eight-and-thirty without growing at all older than he had been in his twenties. And yet, that was just what their happiness had done for them. If it had kept them young, gloriously and resplendently young, it had also kept them from arriving anywhere. It had prolonged his flowering time, but it hadn’t mellowed him. Growing older would have meant making concessions. He had never made any; had not even learned how, and was still striking back like a boy.
Harriet pointed to the turf beside her, and he dropped down suddenly.
“I’m really not fit to see any one this morning. These first hours—” He shrugged his shoulders and began to pull the grass-blades swiftly, one at a time.
“Are hard for you?”
He nodded.
“Because they used to be your happiest?” Harriet continued, feeling her way.
“It’s queer,” he said quietly, “but in the morning I often feel such an absurd certainty of finding her. I suppose one has more vitality at this time of day, a keener sense of things.”
“My poor boy! Is it still as hard as that?”
“Did you for a moment suppose that it would ever be any—easier?” he asked, with a short laugh.
“I hoped so. Oh, I hoped so!”
Forscythe shook his head. “You know why I haven’t been to see you,” he brought out abruptly.
Harriet touched his arm. “You ought not to be afraid with me. If I didn’t love her as much as you did, at least I never loved anything else so well.”
“I know. That’s one reason I came here. You were always together when I first knew her, and it’s easy to see her beside you. Sometimes I think the image of her—coming down the stairs, crossing the garden, holding out her hand—is growing dimmer, and that terrifies me. Some people and some places give me the feeling of her.” He stopped with a jerk, and threw a pebble across the moat, where the sloping bank, softened and made shallower by the slow centuries, was yellow with buttercups.
“But that feeling, Harold, must be more in you than anywhere. There’s where she willed it and breathed it and stored it for years.”
Harold was looking fixedly at the bare spot under his hand and pulling the grass-blades out delicately. When he spoke, his voice fairly startled her with its sound of water working underground.
“It was like that once, but now I lose it sometimes—for weeks together. It’s like trying to hold some delicate scent in your nostrils, and heavier odors come in and blur it.”
“My poor boy, what can I say to you?” Harriet’s eyes were so dim that she could only put out a hand to be sure that he was there. He pressed it and held it a moment.
“You don’t have to say anything. Your thinking reaches me. It’s extraordinary how we can be trained down, how little we can do with. If she could only have written to me—if there could have been a sign, a shadow on the grass or in the sky, to show that she went on with me, it would have been enough. And now—I wouldn’t ask anything but to be left alone with my hurt. It’s all that’s left me. It’s the most precious thing in the world.”
“Oh, but that, my dear Harold, is too terrible! She couldn’t have endured your doing it,” murmured Harriet, overcome.
“Yes, she could. She’d have done it. She’d have kept me alive in her anguish, in her incompleteness.”
Mrs. Westfield put out her hand entreatingly to stop him. He had lain beside her on the grass so often in the days of his courtship, of his first tempestuous happiness. It was incredible that he should have changed so little. He hadn’t grown older, or wiser, or, in himself, better. He had simply grown more and more to be Eleanor. The misery of his entanglement touched her afresh, and she put her hands to her eyes and murmured, “Oh, that poor little Ethel! How could you do it?”
She heard him bound up, and when she lifted her face he was half the length of the wall away. She called to him, but he waved his hat meaninglessly, and she watched him hurry across the smooth green swell of the hill. Harriet leaned back into the warm angle of masonry and tried to settle into the deep peace of the place, where so many follies and passions had spent themselves and ebbed back into the stillness of the grass. But a sense of pain kept throbbing about her.
It seemed to come from the spot where poor Forscythe had lain, and to rise like a miasma between her and the farms and orchards and the gray-green windings of the river. When at last she rose with a sigh, she murmured to herself, “Oh, my poor Eleanor! If you know, I pity you. Wherever you are, I pity you.”
III
The silence once broken, Forscythe came often to Mrs. Westfield’s garden. He spent whole mornings there, watching her embroider, or walked with her about the ruins on the hilltop, or along the streams that wound through the fertile farm country. Though he said little himself, he made it supremely easy for her to talk. He followed her about in grateful silence while she told him, freely and almost lightly, of her girlhood with Eleanor Sanford; of their life at a convent-school in Paris; of the copy of “Manon Lescault” which they kept sewed up in the little pine pillow they had brought from Schenectady; of the adroit machinations by which, on her fête-day, under the guardianship of an innocent aunt from Albany, Eleanor had managed to convey all her birthday roses out to Père-la-Chaise and arrange them under de Musset’s willow.
Harriet even found a quiet happiness in being with him. She felt that he was making amends; that she could trust him not to renew the terrible experience which had crushed her at their first meeting on the hill. When he spoke of Eleanor at all, it was only to recall the beauty of their companionship, a thing she loved to reflect upon. For if they had been selfish, at least their selfishness had never taken the form of comfortable indolence. They had kept the edge of their zest for action; their affection had never grown stocky and middle-aged. How, Harriet often asked herself, could two people have crowded so much into ten circumscribed mortal years? And, of course, the best of it was that all the things they did and the places they went to and the people they knew didn’t in the least matter, were only the incidental music of their drama.
